


The Don Juan

by cirkutry



Series: Erik Est Mort [1]
Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Backstory, Gang Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Leroux-based, Mental Instability, Past Child Abuse, Psychological Trauma, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, headcanons abound, whatever you'd expect from leroux erik
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 15:06:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12192261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirkutry/pseuds/cirkutry
Summary: Nearing the end of his life, Erik decides to revisit his childhood home.





	The Don Juan

My mother never named me.    
  
It is a fact, not a suspicion. I was the unnamed child. I was the boy in the attic and nothing more. 

 

"The boy," I'd hear her say. “I need to bring the boy food", "I ought to check on the boy."    
  
I was no curiosity to you at least, mother. You knew me for what a was. Not a deformed monkey to be paraded and gawked at, of this you made sure, but I wasn't your son. I was a boy. 

 

A boy with something very, very wrong with him.   
  
I know what I seek in this town. I don't seek out my family's belongings—those I took years ago—I seek a name.   
  
The small village just outside of Rouen isn’t even a speck on a map. A collection of antiquated houses, a water wheel the first thing that catches your eye as it turns near the only mill for miles, old and lethargic as the town itself. No building is impressive here. Shops on the bottom and the living spaces on top, all clustered and slouching, architecture failing after a century. Stock houses, cobblers, blacksmiths and butchers. There's an old church right next to the cemetery, a puny gated area with mossy stones. The inscriptions haven't been readable for years, half buried as they are by the earth. It's quaint enough. Even picturesque in its own decrepit way. 

 

You'd never suspect anything of it.   
  
My father must have put something on the birth certificate. Must have told  _ something _ to the midwives when they arrived. What shall you name it if it is a girl? A boy? And he had likely listed off possible names, unaware that his son wouldn’t be worthy of such a thing.

  
Come to find out one of the two midwives left the village after my birth, horrified as she was I suppose. The other had stayed with my mother, maybe trying to make sense of the thing swaddled in her arms, the baby that looked as if it had died long before it was born.     
  
During my mother's recovery, that midwife held me. She must have, and I don't understand how I never thought of this. Of course, someone had to have held me after my birth. Babies died without it, did they not? It seems strange to me that she didn't leave with her fellow sister and have done with the whole affair. 

 

I'm tempted to ask her why that is, why she wasn't horrified, for you see she's still alive, a woman of nearly seventy who still does work with the women in the village. She sits on the porch of the nunnery.

 

I note the look on her face when she sees the prosthetic nose, the porcelain cheeks attached to the eyeglasses. It’s a glint in her eyes gives it away; she recognizes me. Not many children are born without a nose.   
  


"You are Anais's boy?" She calls to me. 

 

Her habit is wrapped around her like a shroud. It's too big for her, or perhaps it is just her terrible thinness that makes it seem so. Her knotted fingers work at knitting something. Tiny stockings, for an expectant mother perhaps.   
  


I shamble up to the steps, eyeing the cross nailed above the door like a bad omen.

 

“Sister,” I greet, lifting my hat. Act gentlemanly, act human, and you will get what you want out of people.

 

The old woman waves her hand at me. “Oh, take off all that nonsense. I remember you,”

  
I hadn’t expected this. Tentatively, I remove the glasses and reveal to her the gaunt skull-head. Pitted eyes and absent nose a staring trinity of dark holes, daring her to scream or die of shock.   
  
Instead, she smiles. She smiles at me, to my wrecked face, my crooked teeth, and my gaping nose. Any other time I would have taken the insult and simply left—how dare she smile at me. How dare she pretend to be kind. 

 

But I too am old now, and so very tired. I can only accept her sweet smile with the modicum of dignity I still have.   
  
"Yes, I am the son of Anais,"

 

My mother's name is like blood on my tongue. The only reason I even know it is because I all but threatened the man who worked at the town hall to dig up the records. It's how I know of my midwives and their fates.   
  
I learned some oddly unsatisfying things as well. Anais nee Lunel was my mother, Pierre Bonnefoy was my father, respected mason, and that was that. The records of their children were absent, taken or lost the recordkeeper couldn’t say.    
  
Bonnefoy, Bonnefoy, Bonnefoy. Is that what I've been all these years?   
  
Only now, in my final days, do I have a surname to give myself, and in a bitter twist of fate I find I don't want it, but I need it now. If I couldn’t live like a normal man, I might as well die like one, and normal men have last names on their gravestones. Bonnefoy is better than a blank space.

  
"I never did see you around the village," The nun twitters. "I wondered if your father took you to work and we just never saw you. Course, I was a bit embarrassed when you  _ didn't  _ show up. Everyone thought I was mad! Talking of babies that looked like shrunken death's heads. But the priest saw you too, you know. Indeed he did. Never spoke a word about you though. Mm, a shame," She says in that casual way of senile old women, unaware of the way her words cause my head to spin.    
  
"No, I did not go to work with him," Is all I can say, and the midwife chuckles, oblivious.

  
"I'm glad to see you here again. Where did you sneak away to all that time ago? Old Pierre thought you'd gone off and died in the woods,"   
  
"Paris," I say, and she looks up.

  
"Paris? Oh, of course, that’s where all the young boys run off to these days. Wanted to see the War- dreadful thing, that. What were you doing all that way down south?"   
  
"I wanted better work. I remember he was upset I didn’t want to be a mason,” I lie. The nun nods her head, almost sympathetically.

 

“Ah, Old Pierre was like that,”

 

“I’m here to make amends, you see,” And it’s not a lie, that. It’s just that I’m not making amends to another person. 

 

“Amends are good. Healthy for the soul,” She says to herself.

 

“I am looking for the house of my birth, madame,"   
  
"Oh, yes. You’re just some paces away from it," She says, gesturing with one of the needles to a cottage just down the road, right next to the forest that marks the border of the village. A withered tree looms over the roof, its dead branches engulfing half of it.

 

I try to remember any storms that could have mutilated that old oak in such a way and nothing comes to mind. I would have certainly been aware of the tree’s branches brushing against my window like they were now- I was terrified of that tree, how it loomed like a ghoul in winter, branches like crooked fingers-

 

_ Hands. Skeletal, black hands grabbing you- _

  
"Does anyone live in it? Does anyone live in the house down the road?" I ask, my eyes fixed on that house, trying to find the garden, trying to spot the children playing that I know have long since grown up and died before me.   
  
"Only Henri-Baptiste, but I am sure you knew that already,"

  
My weakened heart beats itself into a feverish rhythm, and I begin to walk down that road with terrible purpose, relying heavily on the cane I've had to carry to aid my limp.

  
  
\--~*~--

  
My mother was a haunted woman. Sick as well. A very sick, miserable woman after my birth, but it was a sickness of the mind, not the body. Not at first.

 

I cannot imagine that she was evil. She was overused, overburdened by four other children and a husband. It wasn't all her fault. How many times did she tell me the story? My father took one look at me after I was born, after those midwives left, and said put it in the attic. There was no debate over it, I imagine. Just as swiftly as you’d tuck away a box of old clothes, he proclaimed that the attic was the little thing’s room and it was best to forget.

 

Now, where to begin after that, I do not know. A man cannot remember the circumstances of his birth you see, he can only ask about it, and my mother was loathe to disclose any of it after “Your father hates you, so you live upstairs”- such and such. She was a sharp woman. Even when every fiber of her being was weighed down by exhaustion, she always seemed to have enough fire to spit. “Here’s what you need to know; you were born, you lived, and you continue to do so to my amazement.”

 

Well, of course a baby didn’t survive alone in an attic. My mother spent the first tenders years of my life up there. She was allowed to come down from time to time. I was not. I was nursed, changed, clothed, dare I say I was held with some semblance of care. I can't quite remember that part. When I could walk, the covering came over my face. 

 

Of all the sweet memories I could have retained from an infancy with a gentle mother, I hate to say my first memory is of her kneeling in front of me, putting that cruel burlap bag over my head and pulling the twine tight around my neck so it wouldn't slip off. 

 

My father- whose face I really can't remember as much as I remember his large shape blocking the doorway- he yelled at her to do it. 

 

“Cover it! We don’t want it running around bare, for Christ's sake!” He boomed and I didn't comprehend those words. I didn't understand, not exactly, but I didn't dare try to take the bag off because there'd be yelling. There'd be hitting.    
  
Oh, yes. By a soon ingrained knowledge, I learned not to touch whatever they put on me because I equated it with  _ hitting _ . How my mother perfected the art. 

 

Did you know there are differentiating ways in which to cuff your child? Take the bag off- take the bag off and if she sees you it's your cheek. Quick, a bit of a sting, but you forget about it soon after. Next time it's the top of your head. Two quick, hard blows with an open palm, as if one isn’t enough, as if she couldn’t stop after one. There had to be two. Those can take you by surprise. Those are the ones that make your ears ring. Most know the feeling, you must know, when one’s been hit on the head and the world goes a bit muffled? It clears up in a few moments, nonetheless, it wasn’t something I tolerated well. Not being able to hear, I mean. Scared the devil out of me each time.

 

Don't even try to look out of the window without it on. God! I never tried it after the first time! That's too many strikes, and you'll start to lose count. Your face will go numb with the pain and then you’ll want to press it against the cold window glass- and you have to take the bag off to do that.

 

It was a vicious cycle. I was like a dog being trained not to soil on the floor. Really, I had all the rights of a dog. The right to be fed and cleaned, but a man can still strike a dog when it does something wrong. 

 

A dog can't hit back.

 

\--

 

There were times when mother would start crying after she’d done it. And it was usually after a particularly harsh blow to my head, the ones that made me dizzy. 

 

Once I fell over from the force of it, holding my ears until the ringing inevitably died away, and when it did I heard my mother sniffling.

 

“You know I don’t mean to knock you over, little fool,” She choked out, trying to keep herself from breaking. Her bottom lip caught between her teeth, her eyes pinched and watering, hardly keeping tears from spilling. I suddenly felt terrible for falling down. What a little fool I was indeed.

 

“I’m sorry,” I’d say from my place on the floor, still holding one of my ears.

 

“Why did you take it off?”

 

I knew she meant the bag: “I had to scratch,” I fibbed.

 

“No, you didn’t,” And she was right. God, she could always see right through me, but I couldn’t tell her the real reason.

 

In the foyer of the attic, right next to the door that led downstairs, there was a small powder room I used with a chamber pot and wash basin and a mirror that hung on the wall. I didn’t look into said mirror often, for obvious reasons, but I’d turned it around that day.

 

I had crafted what I’d consider one of my first real masks. It was an unsettling contraption of thick parchment that had a smiling, lopsided mouth drawn on it, along with an attempt at brows above two almond-shaped eyeholes. The nose was actually made of a wood, salvaged from the decaying boards in the farthest corner of the attic where rain sometimes leaked, and I had carved it into an angular shape using a shard of glass. It was stuck unceremoniously into a cut-out in the paperboard, and it gave my project the look of a crude scarecrow fashioned from papier-mâché.

 

My mother found the childish facsimile under my pillow.

 

“What’s this?” She asked, despite clearly knowing what it was. She should have known best what a mask was. 

 

“It’s a craft I made,”

 

“Why?” She snapped. She was scowling, irritated just looking at the thing. It smiled crookedly at her.

 

Was she asking why I made a mask? Was my mother so painfully unaware of my own self-consciousness? 

 

“Because I wanted a nose,” I said.

 

“Because you wanted a nose,” My mother murmured. She didn’t look at me.  _ Couldn’t _ look at me; I still hadn’t put the bag back on.

 

She picked at the fraying edges of the paper, the loose wooden nose. She traced the drawn eyebrows with her finger.

 

“This doesn’t cover you enough,” She said. “The eyeholes are too big. There’s nothing to cover the top of your head,”

 

“But it has a _ nose _ ,” I pointed out, sheepishly covering the hole that passed as my own. It had started to leak. Because I was upset or because I was ill, I can’t recall. It might have been both.

 

“It’s…” She held it at arm’s length as if examining a particularly confusing piece of artwork. “It’s quite ugly. Worse than nothing at all, I’d say,”

 

Our encounter ended without incident. She didn’t hit me again. I put the bag back on, and my mother took away the paper face, scared I’d try and substitute it for my current, much more covering mask. There’s really no point in a mask if it’s more frightful than what it’s covering, eh?

 

I heard her just outside the door, sitting on the steps, sobbing.

 

It’s a strange image I conjure up when I think of it because I can’t help but imagine her clutching the jester-like mask to her chest. The crooked wooden nose, the arched eyebrows, and the rosy lips all pressed her bosom when I had never had such a privilege. A damn mask getting more affection than me! It’s too perfect. Oh, poor, ugly Erik. So ugly he gets jealous of a mask because it’s more becoming than him.

  
  


\--

 

I saw my brothers and sisters a few times. Through the little window that faced the back of the house. Two boys, two girls. Perfect in every way, running about the yard and smiling. Full lips and ruddy cheeks, black hair that got tangled the more they ran around, but they were never truly ratty or unkempt. They looked perfect with their dark, curling hair against pale foreheads, as the God my mother worshipped had no doubt intended children to look. 

 

Mother would sit on the bench in the garden with a stony expression, a book on her lap that she'd never read. Her eyes would pass over the dusky-haired cherubs running about. Sometimes, I even saw her smile. It was a modest, close-lipped smile, but it was genuine, and it was beautiful. Yet just as soon as it appeared, it was gone. Like a candle can’t stay lit in a drafty room, my mother’s long face could not bare a smile for too long. Her eyes would wander then, looking beyond the garden, looking somewhere that must have been far more interesting.   
  
I'd rap on the glass when I was brave. Oh, not loudly, just a little knock. I wanted the children to look up and see me more through will alone. I didn't know why then.  _ Up here! Up here! _ I shouted in my mind.  _ You’re so close, just look up! _

 

Now, I wonder if I subconsciously wanted those children to rescue me. Those children who shared my blood but not my face.    
  
I remember- frighteningly clear- how my mother once looked up just after I'd knocked on the glass. Had she heard? 

 

She saw me, I saw her, and we held each other's attention for a moment before I ducked down, stricken with fear. All day, I made myself half sick with it.  _ She's going to come upstairs. She's going to give me a good beating. I shouldn't have looked, she doesn't like looking at me.  _ __   
  
And she did come upstairs, at the end of the day when the only light in my attic came from the candles by the windowsill and at the foot of my bed. She appeared like a ghost in her floor-length nightgown. Her hair was unpinned and falling about her shoulders in waves of black, seeming a glossy lavender by the candlelight.

  
"Were you looking out the window today?" 

  
I stood still, fearing my movements would ignite her temper. 

 

"Yes," I answered.   
  
"Speak up!"   
  
"Yes, I did mother," I said, voice wavering. I had the urge to sound bigger than I was, to make my voice loud and deep, but all it did was crack. 

  
"I feel as if I’m going mad, seeing your little face everywhere," She said quietly, and then she started up the stairs towards me with slow, purposeful steps. I didn't move. I was petrified, by her haunting beauty, the sheer look of misery in those dark eyes. 

 

The great irony of it all is that my mother would have made a better ghost than me. She had all the sorrowful elegance of a ghost, whereas I’ve only ever been a wraith. A leering demon. Had my mother been the one to haunt the opera house, I daresay she’d need never manipulate anyone. Those who would glimpse her would leave offerings _. _

 

"I love you, mama," I whispered, terrified as the words left me. I didn't know where they'd come from.    
  
No, that’s a lie. I know the reason for it. It was a cruel experiment; I wanted to see if she’d say it back.

 

She cocked her head, almost confused I think, like she hadn't heard me right. Then she seemed to deflate, defeated by the simple words of a child. As if I'd beaten her in an argument. 

 

We seemed to have whole conversations with nothing but our eyes. The one thing I shared with her, these unextraordinary brown things. In these instances there could be such intense loathing in her eyes. I can’t imagine what she saw in mine.    


She nodded. Such a small thing, a nod, but it was something I could wrap my head around. It meant approval. It meant understanding.   
  


"Yes, I know. I know," She said and then she placed her hand on top of my head for a moment. 

 

My tiny heart about stopped because I realized I’d forgotten the bag. I could feel the warmth of her hand, her fingers just brushing against the tips of my ears, carded through my hair. Her hand went to my cheek, ran her thumb over the protruding bone, and then pulled away.

 

“Don’t let me see you without that bag on again, do you understand?”   
  
I couldn't sleep that night. I think that was the start of that dreadful habit—skipping nights of sleep in order to mull over my thoughts. I was also afraid to go to bed. Afraid that if I did, the memory of my mother touching me would be fuzzy in the morning. From one side of that attic to the other I paced. Our house wasn't a palace by any means, but it was spacious, and so my attic was a maze of boxes and antique furniture, the dust covers making the whole place seem a carnival of white tents. 

 

“She’s never touched me on the head before,” I told the dressmaker's mannequin in the corner. “Well, to give me baths, but that was different. She was rough with me. Do you think she’d ever give me a kiss?”

 

The dress mannequin spoke in a high, childish voice back to me. “ _ I wouldn’t try it if I were you, _ ”

 

I became indignant. “Why not?”

 

“ _ Because you’ll scare her to death! _ ” It said shrilly.

 

“You can’t scare people to death,”

 

“ _ Oh, yes you can, _ ” It insisted. “ _ Your mother says it all the time! ‘He scares me half to death’. You’ve  _ heard _ her say it, _ ”

 

I contemplated this. Then, in a voice just an octave higher than my own, the mannequin said, “ _ Or maybe she only did it so you’d quit pestering her, _ ” 

 

“She usually hits me if she wants me to stop pestering her,” 

 

The dress mannequin spoke no more. Once again, it was a lifeless torso stuck on a wooden pole.

 

I woke up the next morning feeling stiff and sore all over. I didn’t even bother limping over to my bed. I lay with rickets and my miserable boredom on that chair all morning. Mother found me like that when she brought me breakfast. I’m sure she felt a twinge of wrongdoing, the urge to take me outside for a spell if only to let me have some sun. 

 

She didn’t, of course. Merely handed me a tray of toast and tea and told me to get into bed. She’d bring a hot water bottle, but only if I stopped my “wretched moaning”. I hadn’t been aware I’d made a sound.

  
  


\--

 

Once, I had a glimpse—and it really was just a glimpse—of what a true family looked like.

 

The one window in my room didn’t have a lock to keep it shut. It was meant to be opened. Judging by the hinge at the top one was meant to prop it open to let the attic air out, but it had been sealed shut with nails. The work wasn’t haphazard, and it took the better part of a summer with the aid of an ash shovel to finally pry the nails off.

 

_ Sunlight _ . You don’t realize how much you crave sunlight, how much you ache for it to touch your skin until you’ve stood in it. From that moment on it is like a drug you must seek out. When you are without it for too long, you can’t help but think of it, how it wraps itself around you and warms your body from the inside out. 

 

I was four when I first crawled out of that broken window, and it terrified me. There were no walls, no floors, just space. Endless, neverending hills and trees and fields in all directions. I felt lost simply looking at everything. 

 

The alien feeling of being engulfed by heat and humidity gave me the impression that I’d done something wrong, for the air outside was unbreathable! No wonder I was never let out! All at once, everything was heavy, a warm blanket and I the stupid animal it had been tossed over. It was like when I was cuffed on the head; the world spun like a dropped button, did a funny tilt, and then unceremoniously deposited me on the ground.

 

When you faint, truly lose hold of your senses and drop like that, it feels like a dream. I can’t say I even remembered when I lost consciousness. One moment I was being burned alive by the evil sun, and the next I was lying on roofing tiles, a pleasant warmth beating down on my back.

 

I rolled onto my back and stared up at the source of all this confusing heat, a white-hot ball of light that instantly scorched my sensitive eyes and made me roll back onto my stomach. Oh, so that’s the sun when it isn’t setting—and I’d only ever seen it set through my window. It was red then, not nearly so intense.

 

Like most things in my young life, like losing a tooth or being hit by your mother, I become used to the sun, and to the wide open space that was this new  _ outside. _ I lay like a content cat on the roof, soaking in the warmth, and even with the bag still on I felt like I was free. Like I had never truly taken a breath until I’d taken it from the air outside. 

 

The air outside is different, you know. I don’t believe most humans know there are different types of air. They take their walks in the park, their strolls down the street for granted. Do they know what it is to be kept in the same room, to breath the same air for so many years?  Air, no matter if it keeps you alive, can still suffocate you in a way. Air can be musky and cramped, air can be old, air can taste bad. I hadn’t known these things until I’d lain on the roof and breathed _.  _ I realized that air didn’t always have to be stuffy. You can taste the air and not be repulsed by the lingering dust or the scent of mildew. And how magnificent is that? To know nothing but a room your entire life and to introduce yourself to the endless horizon. The world was endless. The world wasn’t just a room.

 

Had it not been for the sudden clamor of voices in the distance, I would have stood up and started dancing on the roof with joy.

 

It was the same instinct that told me not to take the bag off my head that made me huddle down on my stomach and lie still as a stone. The fear of anyone seeing me.

 

“We should pick some!” Said a voice, a voice a little younger than mine.

 

An older woman responded. “You’ll make a mess of yourself.”

 

“But they’ll be all shriveled up soon.”

 

Mother. The child was talking to her mother.

 

I dragged myself along the roof just enough to peer over the edge, at the road that passed in front of our house.

 

Sure enough, a little girl was bent down at the side of the road. She was picking dandelions and putting them in her frock’s pocket.

 

A woman, who I could tell even from a distance was much plumper than my own mother, looked on. She’d occasionally accept dandelions the little girl would give to her, blowing the fuzz off them. 

 

They made their way down the road, both their aprons full of dandelions, covered in fluff and dirt, and the mother didn’t care. The mother didn’t care when the child pushed dandelions into her hands, the mother didn’t care when the girl took her hand as she toddled along, and the mother didn’t care that she’d gotten dirty. 

 

No. The mother cared so little about the dirt and the weeds that, as they made their way along the path, she picked her little girl up. Dirty hands, weeds and all.

 

The sun had burnt the skin on my neck and arms. The inside of the bag was so hot that sweat ran into my eyes.

 

Like the mother, I didn’t care.

 

“Do you think my mother would ever carry me like that?” I asked the quiet, summer air. 

 

No one answered me.

  
  


\--

 

I could hear my siblings laughing and playing downstairs. In my later years, I'd pound at the door in righteous anger at not being let out. I’d stomp around and scream and scratch at the walls like a possessed thing from the madness of being so close to other children but unable to see them. My mother would clap me across the face, and back downstairs she went. I sat, quietly sniffling. I pressed my ear to the floor to try and catch the sounds of those children. 

 

I was growing. Rickets had gone away, but in their place were the early growing pains of boyhood and I was irritable. Easy to hiss and bat at my mother when she tried to punish me, and all too eager to scare her by leaving the bag off my head. 

 

She never did touch my head after that.   
  
I suppose my unrest coincided with some shift in the order of things. Everything turned to chaos in that house. I could hear more spats between mother and father. A few times, I heard the raised voices of young men downstairs. My brothers. 

 

My mother too went quite mad in the years before I ran away as well. When the house was silent and empty, my brothers and sisters at school and my father at work, she threw open the door with a deranged sort of passion and dragged me downstairs. 

 

I had an affinity for absorbing everything, denied as I was. Mother taught me to read, to write and do maths, and each month it seemed she'd grow paler and thinner and her eyes farther away. Don't be fooled; each time I attempted to touch her, she'd swat at me as if I was a fly. 

 

“Get away! Ugly thing! You're down here to learn! Do you want to be sent upstairs again?” And I stopped because if there's one thing more nightmarish than being denied touch, it was being denied knowledge, which I craved and drank as a heat-stricken man does water. 

  
The house below my attic was a simple one. Modest Louis-Philippe furniture and floral wallpaper. I never saw my sibling's rooms, my father's study. I was confined to the kitchen and the drawing room and even then I wasn't allowed to let my eyes wander. It never felt like my house and it never would. To think an entire world existed below me was surreal.

 

Well, there was one time that was out of the ordinary.

 

“Come help me with a chore,” My mother asked me one dreary afternoon. I remember; the rain pattered on the windowsills. She made me light candles in the living room so I could do my work.

 

Dutifully abandoning my work, I followed her down a hallway I’d never been allowed to step foot into before.

 

The room she walked into was undoubtedly my parent’s. A single large bed, the one that would find its place in my guest bedroom in forty-some years, and all that simple mahogany furniture. There were portraits on the wall of elderly people, grandparents I never knew of, right next to paintings of flowers and countryside hills and birds. I stared at these intently, memorizing for no other reason than I wanted to memorize. I can still recall the order of them; grandmother, grandfather, blackbird, starling, sparrow, lily, rose, a field.

 

I must have been too enraptured with the little portraits. Mother gave me a small tap on the head.

 

“Come now- enough daydreaming,”

 

She opened a large chest on the foot of the bed. Inside I spied a white gown, a pair of white shoes, an abundance of sewing materials, but most importantly, I saw books. 

 

I could hardly contain myself as my mother handed me the largest book in the chest.

 

“This was your father’s,” She said, sounding as if she was in the middle of a daydream herself. Her voice was far, far away, just like her eyes.

 

I stared at the broad leather cover with its faded gold lettering; A Examination of the World and its Cultures. 

 

“It’s yours,” She said. “I don’t see any reason why he’d need it now,”

 

I hugged the giant tome to my chest, a noble effort seeing as I was smaller than most children, marginally thinner of course, but I managed to hold onto that book and carry it back to the living room.

 

“May I read this instead of doing arithmetic?” I asked as sweetly as I could.

 

My mother looked between me, sitting on the parlor floor with the book atop my legs, and the mess of papers. I think she was quite sick of schooling me. She claimed I was going about it “wrong”, that I was moving too quickly. It haunted her, I think, that the one child of hers that was unfit for society turned out to be intelligent. 

 

“We ought to give the books a rest,”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because it’s not good for children to do nothing but sit and read all day. Are you not bored?”

 

“No,” I said quickly.

 

Her mouth turned into a thin line. 

 

She beckoned me, and I obeyed without question. 

 

“I want to show you something else. Sit at the piano,”

 

I nearly tripped over myself to obey her. I was never allowed to touch the piano.

 

Mother sat at the opposite end of the bench. I knew what was about to transpire was nigh-religious in its intimacy.

 

“Listen carefully now. Listen and do exactly as I tell you. Put your hands on the keys, curl them. Yes, like that,”

 

And she played. And it was as if I’d woke up from a long, long dream

  
  


\--

 

I read my father's book until I saw the words behind my eyelids as I slept. I composed in my attic; on the walls and the floors. Music that didn’t make sense, music that climbed and fell and ran and screamed and cried with me, music that crept into every crevice and turned the rotten wood into something precious. I could hear without the piano, I discovered. I could keep time without the metronome. It was like discovering magic, to know that this was what hands were capable of. 

 

I composed until my knees were purple from kneeling on the floor. I craved it. I loved it. Finally, I  _ loved _ , and I thought I loved more than anyone ever had, or ever could. One day it’d kill me, but I didn’t know that yet. I loved, I loved, I loved.

 

My mother struck me, that is true. She yelled at me, and my father at her, but the worst sin was leaving a child alone with that knowledge. My new siblings were the little drawn people in the margins of my wall-length songs, my mother was the pillow I hugged at night, my father was the book I hid under the floorboards, a book that told of every country on earth and its customs. A book of drawings and graphs and maps which I treated as my bible. 

 

\--

 

I was fascinated by this world of which I’d only glimpsed out my window. Those places incomprehensibly far away where the people spoke different languages and wore different clothes. In that book, I saw the oceans and the tropics, the ice-capped mountains of the north and the deserts of the far east. The myths and customs, while they were but footnotes in comparison to the atlases, told me the most interesting things of all. In this country, they believe in spirits and in this one vampires, in this country they celebrate this in honor of that, so forth. Tidbits of information, but I held onto them with a fascination unparalleled. 

 

The pirates who stole and the revolutionaries who rampaged. The exiled, as I knew from my brief teachings of the Bible, were the most powerful in the end. Those who took on an exodus emerged wise and powerful men precisely because they had suffered. Erik the Red, why, he’d been an exile hadn’t he? For manslaughter, albeit not a victimless crime, didn’t seem so horrific in the eyes of a child who’d never quite known right from wrong, and I latched onto that legend in the way normal boys fixate on fairytales, except I had no one to remind me these stories were a myth. It didn’t matter. I wanted something that my young mind could only just wrap itself around; I wanted freedom.

 

The name Don Juan was not yet familiar to my tongue, let alone conceived on paper in bloody ink, but in that attic I had the idea in those dreams of the conqueror, the triumphant _._ Kindling was needed though. I needed experience, I needed inspiration to write such a monstrous bloodsong, and that young boy could never have dreamed of all the sorrow needed. That young boy would not have dared imagine the _love_ needed for my opera. 

 

That ogre of imagination loomed over me as I grew older. It mocked me as I sat hunched over some charcoal drawing of a house that would never be, an instrument I couldn’t make. I’m better than this, to waste away in a room, I thought. And I thought it often until the thought became a wish and the wish became a promise.

 

There were other things I wanted more. A place to sleep, obviously. My mother? A necessity. There could be nothing more than this. 

 

I was still young and I was weak and so my situation was alright. This is what I told myself.

 

\--

 

I knew not my day of birth. It occurred to me one day as I read that book which told of human customs that I should note it, if not out of tradition then out of curiosity. I declared myself five years old then, a good median number, and one year older each Christmas, the only holiday of which I was acquainted. 

 

“Jesus was born, that’s why we celebrate it,” I explained to the mannequin when my sixth year eventually came around.

 

“ _ That seems disrespectful,”  _ It griped. “ _ To be celebrating your birthday on Jesus Christ’s. Do you think Jesus wants anything to do with you?” _

 

“I don’t think he would care,” I explained. “Besides, it’s much easier to- to remember when your birthday is on Christmas,”

 

My mother never questioned the fresh scratches on the wall next to the door—the markings of a crazed child with nothing better to do. 

 

The importance of these tallies came on the day of my tenth birthday. 

 

The day mother died.

 

She never came to the door. Never brought me breakfast. I thought she was punishing me for something. I choked up the courage to pick the lock and open the door.

 

I smelled candles. I smelled the sickly sweetness- the same smell that came from the walls when a rat or a bird would get stuck inside and die. 

 

My teeth chattered as I crept down the stairs.

  
Scarlet fever, they said. I sat, looking through the stair banister and into the parlor beyond the sitting room. I listened to the weeping of my sisters, watching their backs turned to me as they congregated around something. 

 

I realized in a horrible instant, like the breaking of glass, who we were mourning.

 

I could just see the casket, but not my mother’s face inside. Just the tops of her polished shoes turned towards the ceiling. There were too many flowers, too many people. Too many awful, awful smells. They tried to cover up her sickness with candles and white lilies and all they’d done was make the entire house smell like her funeral.

  
Like distant thunder rolling over the hills, I heard my father speak to his children. "It was her time. She's not in pain anymore."

 

\--

 

I say I never saw my father, and this is true, but I heard him then. I felt his presence as he paced around downstairs. Without my mother, what was I to do? She had let me into the back garden after our schooling lessons—bag on my head, of course—and she'd tell me the names of the flowers and the vegetables and the herbs in her distant voice.  _ That’s parsley. Those are carrots. When they’re ready to pick the tops come up to your shins, so don’t touch them yet. _ She'd let me watch her play the piano. She gave me books and blankets and food, and it was enough. I didn’t need her to love me or hug me or kiss me, I just wanted to watch her play the piano. It was enough. It was enough.

  
Now what?    
  


I thought about making a racket—I was tempted to break every piece of furniture in that Godforsaken attic and light it on fire if it meant I’d wake my mother up from the dead. What a sight that’d be!  _ That boy is making a racket again! Let me get out of this coffin and give him a lashing. _

 

I lay on my bed, curled up tight and unmoving. I told myself that if I willed it hard enough, perhaps thought about it too much, I could kill myself. I’d follow my mother into heaven. The notes on the walls looked less and less like music and more like thousands of ugly little bugs. Childish, stuck in the same patterns of Mozart and Bach. It wasn’t good music. She’d never taught me beyond the basics.

 

“ _ And now she’s gone,”  _ The mannequin said, and somehow the voice carried over to me from the other side of the attic, through my bedroom door. 

 

“But  _ why? _ ” 

 

“ _ You idiot,”  _ The mannequin hissed. “ _ You daft, stupid child, it’s because she’s died,”  _

 

“She shouldn’t have. She wasn’t an old woman, she should be here. She should be bringing me food. I don’t want to be alone. I’ll die if she doesn’t come back,” 

 

The mannequin’s voice, oddly enough, seemed like it was crying too. “ _ Then go ahead and die you little _ —y _ ou little  _ **_roach_ ** _ ,” _

 

It would have to be that way, wouldn’t it? I would die alone in this attic with my books and my pillow and my drawings and my father would never take my body away.    
  
\--

My mother used to take off the bag when I was still too young to care for myself. She'd take a cloth and wash my poor excuse of a face, scrubbing at the hole that was my nose, the poor skin, futilely smoothing back my shock of black hair with a wet brush. 

  
"Do you know why your father keeps you up here?"   
  
I played with the water in the basin a moment, cupping some with my hands and watching it trickle out through my fingers. Like that moment with her in the garden, this memory is oddly clear to me. I can still smell the soap she was using on me, lavender and mint.    
  


After a moment, I think I shook my head.   
  
"Because you are ugly. Do you understand what that means?"   
  
I shook my head again.

 

_ Ugly, _ I thought over the new the word, feeling uneasy with the sound of it. 

 

She turned me to face her, her face hard yet her eyes full of tears I couldn't comprehend. My tiny hands reached out to her in question but she slapped them away.    
  
"It means you...you're not made in the image of God. You do know who God is, right?"   
  
I nodded, my hands still stinging. I stuck them under the water.    
  
She grabbed my head and before I could be elated at the feeling of my mother touching me, a sensation so foreign it sent prickles through my skin, she was squeezing. Squeezing my head hard enough that I began to see black spots.   
  
"Look at me," She demanded, the tears falling freely now, her beautiful face twisted into something red and inhuman. "What do I have? What do you see on my face?" And suddenly the squeezing had stopped, and she was pinching the bridge of bone between my eyes and tugging my head back and forth until the blacks spots in my vision erupted into painful sparks of color.   
  
"And your skin. Look at your  _ skin _ , my God. Yours isn't enough! It's not enough! It barely covers your bones!" And then she took my arms in her hands, gripping so tight I began to cry hysterically for fear she'd break me, and for the first time I saw how pale I was against her tawny hide, how my veins were green and everywhere and her's were faint lines in her wrist, hidden safely beneath her dark skin. My wrists were like birch twigs in her fists. It was all so wrong.   
  
I understood something quite terrible at that moment. 

 

\--

  
I was incomplete with my lack of this thing called a nose and this thin skin. These eyes that shone like an animal's in the dark. Present me recalled this memory, and it affected me far differently than it had then.   
  
I was different. I was incomplete. I wasn't made in God's image.   
  


_ I will not die alone! I will not die in an attic! _ My child's heart cried with each beat. I was ugly. There was no one that looked like me and I was alone in this world, but as long as the bag stayed over my head, no one had to know. No one had to know I was incomplete. My secret. My secret and no one else's.   
  
1,862 scratches since that day when I'd decided I deserved a birthday. Ten years old. Exactly one decade, I recounted from my lessons. 

 

It seemed to me a flawless number, like all the dealings of the universe had fallen into place perfectly so that I may be free at exactly ten years of age. I can't explain it. My mind works in mysterious ways, and while I don't believe myself to be superstitious now, I can't say the same for that little boy. To him, it was a sign.   
  
I took the coverlet off my pillow and stuffed books in it, my compositions and drawings tucked safely away between the heavy pages. I climbed up the far wall of the attic, boosting myself on uneven boards and shelves, and unlocked the hexagonal window that had been my only source of daylight in that dingy room.    
  
My body was thin, still too small for my age even as I was growing, and I was able to slip out and onto the roof with ease, my pillowcase of books slung over my back, the pillow itself clutched tightly to my chest.    
  
I uprooted half the garden that night. I shoved dirty carrots and parsnips into my sack, glancing over my shoulder at the darkened windows of the house to make sure no one saw my thievery.  _ When they’re ready to pick the tops come up to your shins.  _ I imagined more than felt my mother looming over me, a critical eye examining my picking the carrots. They weren’t up to my shins yet, but they were close, even if they did come up a bit small and yellow, bitter tasting.

 

“I’m sorry, mother,” I said to the ghost no doubt standing behind me. “I really do need these. Can you forgive me?”

 

In life she never forgave me for anything. I can’t recall a moment when she ever said so much as an “I’m sorry” or an “I lost my temper”, but the ghost I conjured up was more than willing to do so in her colorless voice.

 

“ _ Oh alright, I forgive you. Just leave before anyone catches you, _ ” My mother said to me.

 

“I will, I will,” I frantically whispered to myself, smoothing the soil out with my toes, wiping my hands on my trousers. “Goodbye, mama,”

 

“ _ Goodbye, son, _ ” The last words my mother ever said to me.

 

I stole into the woods on bare feet, my breath coming in pants that made the inside of the burlap bag hot and itchy, but I dared not take it off. I had the oddest feeling that if I did, mother’s ghost would come back from the dead to deal me a final slap to my cheek.   


It’s all so asinine to me now, now that I know what was to happen to me. Had I possessed any worldly knowledge at that age, I would have simply walked into the village and revealed my existence. Perhaps I would have found some kind of care, or at least exposed my family for keeping me locked away. Would there have been outrage, back then? But that’s a foolish thought too. Not everyone can be as bafflingly accepting as the midwife. I might have ended up in squalor, in an orphanage.

 

I don’t think of these things. 

 

The crux of it is, I stupidly made my way towards the forest, never considering turning back. Never considering finding a road or a source of water or shelter.

 

\--

  
The woods near my village weren't as untamed as those I had read of in either documentation or fairytales. These were no intimidating jungles of giant leering trees, creeping vines and demons ready to pounce at me from their hiding spots in the shadows. It seemed almost peaceful, if not completely alien to my senses, which were overwhelmed by the sheer spaciousness of my surroundings and the unfamiliar sensations that went with it. I might as well have been newly born, exposed to the barrage of sights and smells that came with the forest. From the far away screaming of an owl to the pungent smell of rotting berries, even the sound of unseen crickets left me uneasy for I had never heard them so close. 

  
The ground was cool and soft beneath my bare feet, a carpet of dead leaves on top of sodden dirt and moss. The only animals I spotted were the occasional creature- a squirrel or a rabbit perhaps- which crossed my path, staring with reflective eyes that mirrored my own before scampering off into the brush. A full moon's glow filtered through the canopy, illuminating the forest around me with sparse blue light that made everything seem like a whimsical dream.    
  


I could see a truncation of the trees and brush just ahead. I stood in perplexed wonder, realizing that I had stumbled across a path. The same kind of path travelers happened upon that led them to great places, no doubt. Perhaps this led to the Silk Road! Perhaps I'd meet others like me. Children who were ugly and cast away from their homes.   
  
_Orphans_ , children without parents were called. I would meet a group of orphans traveling this road.  
  
The ground went from soft to hard packed. I placed both my feet in the divots left by decades of wagon wheels. I wiggled my toes in the dust, the first feelings of apprehension coming over me. The dirt road went on forever into the woods, so far that eventually the sheer distance of it left its endpoint obscured by fog and darkness. 

 

I’d always been fearful of darkness. It was an unsafe practice to constantly have candles lit all over one’s room, but I necessitated it as a young child. Without it, without that constant safe glow of light, I dreamt of darkness. I was suffocated by it. Dreams of tall shadows in flowing black dresses pounding me on the head, squeezing me until I couldn’t breathe, sticking my head underwater and telling me to look at how ugly I was. They’d chant. _Ugly, ugly, ugly!_ —until it didn't sound like a word anymore. 

 

Hands, so many dark, indistinguishable hands, stretching out from the inky shadows to tear at my skin while they smiled with their needle teeth. Worst of all, sometimes the shadows would grow, they’d become bulkier, their hands bigger. Gone were the needle teeth. The face was without features. It would loom over me, and in a voice like approaching thunder, like God himself, the shadow would command me—

 

“ _ Cover yourself! We don’t want you running around bare, for Christ's sake!” _

 

I made a mistake. I want to go home, I thought.

 

Suddenly, everything seemed darker. So many more crevices for things to hide in surrounded me. Every noise seemed amplified. I could feel the insects creeping over my skin, the snakes slithering across my feet. And the hands. Oh, God, there must be hands reaching behind me, ready to grab me by the collar and kill me. Black hands with rakish, long fingers and sharp yellow nails.

 

But I hadn't yet lost my nerve. I began to walk. One foot in front of the other, just like that, just think of walking and nothing else. The sun has to come up sometime. Imagine when the sun will rise. You’ll be able to see clearly, and nothing can hide from you in the sun.

 

The book thumped against me with every step.  _ Thump, tump. Thump, tump  _ it went, knocking against my boney back. It hurt, but that was good. It was distracting.

 

Then somewhere to my left, deep within the wood, a stick snapped.

 

Like a deer, I stood paralyzed, looking right into the dark trees, trying to see a pair of glowing yellow eyes I knew to be there. Even the owls had stopped their cooing. The wind had fallen silent, as if everything on earth had stopped and waited with me, listening.

 

And then, quiet but horrifyingly clear, I heard another snap. 

 

My mind panicked, making up all sorts of wild beasts in the darkness. Lions with sharp teeth, jowls glistening with hungry drool. Bears with jaws big enough to take my head into them and kill me with one bite. A pack of wolves who would overpower me, each animal taking hold of my limbs and pulling until I was drawn and quartered to their liking. 

 

I began to run, seized with a child’s burst of adrenaline, the kind of possession that can make them sprint for miles while shrieking like a little demon. I did just that. Fast and hard, my bare feet pounding against the dirt until there were clouds of it strewn up about me.

 

I was aware I was crying, but the tears blurring my vision were nothing compared to my fear of what was chasing me. That fear which was creeping up my throat like bile. 

 

As I ran more, and as that tell-tale acid burn of exhaustion began to creep into my legs, I cried harder with despair. I could not keep running. At some point, as happens to all prey animals, I would fall down, crippled, and the monster would come, leer over me with its sharp teeth, and I’d be asleep before I could scream one last time. 

 

Eventually, my terrifying fantasy came true, and my legs went numb, my breaths came in burning, short gasps. I tripped and I fell down hard enough to break the skin on the bottom of my chin. By some miracle, or perhaps the feather pillow I still had clutched in my arms, I didn’t break a rib.

 

I spun around with a scream because I fully expected the beast of my nightmares to be in mid-pounce, claws out and ready to shred into me. 

 

I was met with the sight of a dark, endless path behind me.

 

This did nothing to quell my fears, the great black maw of the cleared trees open and waiting for something to emerge. My blood still rushed through me with visceral agony, heart beating so hard I heard it in my ears and felt it in the tips of my numbed toes.

 

I couldn’t hope to run, so the secondary survival tactic of all of God’s creatures took over.

 

I crawled into the brush and lay there, ready to die.

 

I tried hard to stop my crying, but it was no use. My sobs became even harsher when I realized in my panic I had dropped my book. 

 

I told myself I’d find home in the morning. I’d knock on the front door if I had to, beg my father to take me back. 

 

Anything- anyplace was better than this wilderness.

  
  


 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not an experienced writer. At least, I'm not an experienced fanfic author, so you'll have to forgive my irregular updates and constant editing. I'm horrendous with managing any kind of social media. Anyways, you can expect this story to have about six chapters, though that may change depending on how bad my writing bug get. Or if I get new ideas, which is pret-ty likely. Erik is way too fascinating to have a solid, linear story. 
> 
> Leave your comments/critiques/flames in the comments.


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